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10.26.2004

“HartBeat” is The Hartman Group's FREE online newsletter, providing insight, analysis, information and strategy to give business leaders the knowledge and vision to build sustainable brands.

For more Hartman Group articles on FOOD CULTURE, click here...

September 23, 2004 "Asian Dinner Mixes & the Family Meal: Evolving Food Culture"

August 05, 2004 "Snacking Our Way Through the Day: Food Culture in America"

For more Hartman Group articles on OBESITY, click here...

August 19, 2004 "7 Myths of Obesity in America"

August 05, 2004 "Snacking Our Way Through the Day: Food Culture in America"

June 17, 2004 "Addressing the Problem of Obesity"

April 07, 2003 "The 5 Faces of Obesity"

Feb 11, 2003 "Don't Tell Me I'm Obese, I'm Just Big-Boned"

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What If It's Not About The Food After All:

obesity, food culture and the implications for food marketers & branders

Charged by congress with developing a master plan to address our growing problem with childhood obesity, the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies recently released their findings in a report entitled "Preventing Childhood Obesity: Health in the Balance." The report reads like routine public policy, offering up a laundry list of predictable recommendations for school officials, parents, policy analysts and marketers, including:

Develop nutritional standards and improve the nutritional content for food and beverages sold in schools.
Expand and promote opportunities for physical activity throughout the school as well as the local community.
Careful monitoring of students' BMI/weight measures.
Develop healthier food and beverage products and packaging innovations for the broader marketplace.
Expand consumer nutrition information.
Parents should serve as better role models, encouraging more exercise and less TV watching.
Tighten zoning ordinances to require more sidewalks and bike paths.

Conspicuously absent in this list were straightforward, common-sense suggestions, like reducing the amount of food our children are consuming, as well as more ambitious, provocative undertakings, like promoting a culture that frowns upon snacking. Instead, the panel of experts relied on rational scientific inquiry, methodically deconstructing "the obesity problem," into a series of discreet components such as food chemistry, food nutrition, human psychology and physiology and examining each within the domain of their specific professions. This approach implores us to forever "dig deeper" in search of clearer understandings and, hopefully, better solutions. But what if we've been digging in the wrong direction? And worse yet, what if such digging may, in fact, be a cause of the problem?

These questions ranked among our most important conclusions from Obesity In America. Namely, that our fundamental inability to even recognize - let alone address - the powerful role of culture in eating behavior severely limits our understandings of obesity, not to mention any potential solution(s) to the problem. And less we sound critical of the public policy or scientific communities, we should add that perhaps the most compelling feature of our findings is that they are as applicable to scientists as they are consumers.

For as we traipsed back and forth across this country, what we encountered were Americans - ordinary consumers, policy advocates and scientists alike - obsessed with the details of their food (calories, fat, sugar, carbs, sodium, etc.), strategies for losing weight (diets, portion control, weight management programs, Jenny Craig, etc.), the psychological causes of obesity (lack of self-control, feelings of inadequacy, irresponsibility, etc.) and the science behind losing weight (e.g. "the body converts glucose from carbs into fat"). Note that all of these preoccupations direct our attention inward - inside our food, inside our habits, inside our minds, and inside our bodies - in search of a fix to our problems. And while we are all so busy "digging around" inside ourselves - figuratively as well as literally - what we often fail to remember is that eating always takes place in a larger context, a context that has the power to obscure if not obliterate much of our introspective hard work.

One ironic byproduct of such an obsessive, inward gaze is that we often become desensitized to the amount of calories we're actually consuming. While the knowledge and strategies detailed above (e.g. portion control, calorie counting, dieting, etc.) appear to work well in situations that are within the domain of individual control (e.g., eating in one's house), they fly out the window during activities that are culturally situated (e.g., a birthday party at one's office). It's not that we are unaware of the caloric content of the "birthday cheesecake," or the fact that the piece offered to us is much larger than we would have otherwise served ourselves. Rather, our elegant scientifically inspired solutions are effortlessly trumped by this cultural occasion.

Likewise, the reason diets never work in the long run for consumers is simply because most diets provide no acceptable framework for regular, everyday eating - an activity that is forever and always a cultural activity. True, some people may achieve temporary success with diets (usually by adopting some form of "not eating" or "not eating much"), but when they re-enter the "real world" and attempt to eat the way "everyone else does," the diet inevitably dissolves in the face of routine eating culture. A poignant moment with a consumer in Kansas City illustrated this point perfectly. After losing more than 120 lbs, this exasperated, tearful consumer was explaining that while her doctor was imploring her to "begin eating again," she was terrified at her prospects:

It's like all I know is how to eat and be incredibly fat or how to not eat and lose weight...but I have no understanding of how to eat with my family or my co-workers and be normal. It sounds strange but it's horribly, horribly frightening.

Regrettably, our data suggest this is an all too common scenario for many American consumers.

~ ~ ~

Frankly we remain baffled as to how so many well-meaning folks in scientific, public policy and marketing arenas continue to ignore the role of food culture in our ongoing challenges with obesity. After watching a near century of failure¹, you'd think that more than a few would begin to ask themselves "Hey, maybe it's not the apple that's bad, maybe it's the barrel?" To be certain, a few seem to be coming around to this perspective (see Michael Pollan's recent article Our National Eating Disorder, in the New York Times Magazine) but their numbers remain small. In their absence, we find no less than the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies telling us to build more sidewalks and keep better tabs on our children's BMI's. Please.

And while we could speculate that the inability to think culturally about these challenges is related to our unique cultural heritage, we believe the omission may be more pragmatic. That is, to suggest culture as a cause necessarily implicates culture as a solution, and for many the act of merely talking about how to drive cultural change proves far too unwieldy and difficult - not to mention how to actually inculcate such changes in contemporary life. And yet the evidence from prior successful case studies in cultural change surrounds our daily life.

Some of us may share the memory of the boss with a (lit) cigarette perpetually dangling from his lips, which was irrelevant given that you could barely see your CRT terminal, let alone his face, through the haze of smoke that filled the air. Move ahead 10 years and you'd find a world where the only smokers were found just outside the building's front door. Fast forward to the present and we find a corporate environment where any smoking had best take place in the privacy of one's own home - lest we risk stigmatization and shame by our colleagues. Smoking is simply no longer culturally appropriate in the corporate climate. By all accounts from the prevention literature, scientific conclusions, public service announcements and surgeon general's warnings never got us very far in the battle against cigarette smoking. Conversely, what does appear to have worked is a general cultural shift that holds cigarette smoking in collective disfavor. Somehow, in the last 15 years cigarette smoking became something that people just don't do - at least not in public anyway.

Of course the leap from smoking to eating is a big one and will require substantially more creativity and effort. Identifying those elements of food culture which are broken, inferior or otherwise in need of repair will be no small feat. While our own evidence suggests much of the answer may lie in notions of commensality - practices of eating together, at the same table, never alone and often in highly ritualized fashion - we have yet to even speculate as to how one might promote such ideas as a curative for the growing obesity dilemma. Still, one can't help but to try to imagine an alternate universe, one in which, say, snacking - especially in the confines of one's workplace - is construed as "selfish, irresponsibly indulgent behavior," not in accord with "our general way." Who knows, perhaps someday in the near future we'll reminisce fondly of the days when it was considered acceptable to head to the drive-thru and stuff ourselves in the privacy of our own car rather than enjoy lunch in the company of our peers.

We could squabble about the specifics, but I think you get the general drift.

~ ~ ~

Finally, we believe food marketers and brand managers may have the most at stake in the ongoing obesity debates. Of course it's not the case that a successful, culture-centric campaign targeting obesity will reduce our dependence on food, or necessarily need even change the composition of our everyday diet. What such a move could alter, however, is our general attitude(s) toward eating. And even a small shift in the direction of eating culture could spell disaster for those brands heavily invested in our current science-based eating practices that typically stress dietary omission (low-calorie, low-fat, low-sugar, low-carb, etc.) as their chief vector. By comparison, those brands on the forefront of the general cultural shift in eating practices may benefit much more substantially. Put another way, if diet soda or low-carb pasta are to the world of obesity what Nicorette is to the world of smoking, we know where our money's going to be when the revolution comes.

Successful cultural brands have this magical way of involving themselves in the habit and custom of everyday life, often without obvious sign. Whether by strategy or happenstance, Levi's enjoyed this enviable position in American society for many years, negotiating a symbiotic relationship between fashion and culture. And rather than screwing things up by trying to devise a denim slack for every need, occasion or purpose they simply chose to highlight their product's historical relationship with American culture, in the process driving a world where choice becomes all but obsolete.

The rock band Phish, having decided to "officially retire," recently played their farewell show in Coventry, Vermont. Originally planned as an outdoor, two-day marathon at the local air force base, things quickly unraveled in the face of a non-stop downpour. When the unexpected rains caused festival organizers to close all access to the concert site and instruct concertgoers to turn around, most responded the only way they knew how. They simply pulled their cars to the side of the road, parked and began walking through rain, standing water and mud to the concert site - a walk that averaged 12 miles. Once there, they were treated to a show that was, by all accounts, rather lackluster - which I suppose is really the point.

For to really "get" the power of a cultural brand is to understand that for these consumers there was no "choice," in the matter, no elegant tradeoff of costs and benefits. Never mind the driving rain or the mud, or the fact that Phish didn't play particularly well. Making the pilgrimage was simply something that had to be done, much in the same way children gather for a parent's funeral. As one fan remarked in a language that should surely capture the attention of marketers, "When you're a part something this real and this big, it's not like you have any choice in the matter, it is just what you do."

¹While we've been collectively preoccupied with our growing waistlines for more than 80 years, most data suggest we're bigger than at any previous point in our nation's history.

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